Solitude Has Stages
Stage Five Is a Hard No
It started perfectly. One good day alone in the hills, just you and the kind of quiet that actually works. The kind where your brain finally stops running its background programs. Out here, with sagebrush scraping your shins and a river threading through the valley below like it has somewhere to be, everything felt reset. Clean slate. Full battery. You almost feel smug about it.
Then you get home.
Stage two hits somewhere around checking your phone. The world kept moving. Nobody noticed the reset. A little irritation creeps in, which is fair. Then the irritation fades and something quieter moves in behind it. Loneliness. Not the dramatic kind, just the low hum of realizing you were gone and nobody really noticed the gap.
Stage three bleeds into four without much fanfare. Suddenly the math seems obvious. People complicate things. Solo is cleaner. You stop waiting for the invite and start preferring the absence of one. There is a weird peace in that, honestly. Probably not a healthy peace, but it is a peace.
Stage five, well, you know the type. Roadside signs. Manifestos. Not the destination.
So most of us loop back. Pack the van, head home, make plans to do it again soon. The deer on the hillside do not care about any of this. They just stand there watching, mildly suspicious, doing their deer thing. That feels right somehow.
The hills are still there. The river is still moving. And for one afternoon, the noise stopped long enough to hear yourself think, which turns out to be both the cure and the problem.
March 25th Strikes Again
March 25th marks the anniversary of getting laid off from Sikorsky Aircraft in 2004, a moment that seemed devastating but set in motion two decades of Montana adventures, from discovering wildflowers to fat biking through blizzards. Looking back through fifteen posts spanning twenty-two years shows how the uncomfortable moments and unexpected crashes became stepping stones to the next good thing.
Read more: https://8i11.vercel.app/story/x6a0wlce